1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a copying apparatus of portable type which is able to print out one or more lines by picking up or extracting the lines from a text that has been read by the portable copying apparatus.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the Japanese patent laid open publication (JP-A) No. 102466/1988, there is disclosed a copying apparatus of portable type capable of printing one or more lines extracted from lines which have been read by an image reader.
FIGS. 13 to 16 show the manner of printing of this copying apparatus.
When an area p of a document is read by scanning the copying apparatus in a direction P manually as shown in FIG. 13, a document image p as shown in FIG. 14 is obtained. When the document image p is obtained, a blank line having no data to be printed therealong is searched for downwardly from the upper edge UE of the document image p.
When the first blank line is found, as indicated by "a" in FIG. 14, an image portion existing above the first blank line a is erased. Thereafter, the search for the blank line is done upwardly from the lower edge LE of the document image p. An image portion existing below the first blank line b found is also erased. Thus, only the central line image is printed out as shown in FIG. 16.
In another method for erasing unnecessary images, as shown in FIG. 15, a blank line is searched for from the center image line CL of the document image upwardly and an image portion existing above the first blank line u is erased. Similarly, an image portion existing below the first blank line d found by the downward search is erased. According to this method, only the central image line is printed out as shown in FIG. 16.
However, it is not easy to manually move the copying apparatus parallel to image lines of a document. If the copying apparatus is moved in a meandering direction as indicated by a line Q in FIG. 17, such a document image q as shown in FIG. 18 is obtained inconveniently. In this case, it becomes impossible to search for blank lines since they are meandering in the read document image q. Thus, it is impossible to print out only the central image line by the conventional portable copying apparatus.